In which Great Grandmother's recipes endure modernization, alteration & other misdeeds

Cheese Cake (German Käsekuchen)

Not only is this recipe incompletely recorded by my great grandmother… It’s also an unusual recipe. Totally unfamiliar, very difficult to imagine and predict… and so amazingly delicious!

I had to fill in so many spaces with only a few similar (though not identical) recipes to compare it to… it’s impossible to say whether or not my final product turned out correctly. I’m not too worried because at least I now have another delicious treat to make!

This recipe has been taunting me for years now. From what I gathered, it was a German cheesecake, or Käsekuchen, and everything about it has intrigued me. (note: Ottie’s heritage included a hearty dollop of German). The cake promised to be delicately flavored with lemon zest, had chopped golden raisins, and involved cheese.

However… Great Grandmother jotted down the recipe haphazardly, leaving out ingredients and entire steps. Being so unfamiliar with this cake, I had to rely on experience, research, and a lot of guesswork to fill in the gaps.

Some of my guesses were proven very wrong while I was making this… but fortunately nothing was ruined along the way. I assumed there was a crust… because most of the other Käsekuchen recipes I saw had a crust, and also because the ingredients mentioned both eggs and sugar twice. Therefore, I knew there were two parts, and I tried to approach it as a crust and filling. Nope. The “crust” was a vanilla-flavored cake-like base. The “filling” appeared to be a lemon-flavored cottage cheese custard… The chopped golden raisins rested between the two layers. I was partly horrified as I placed it in the often. (it didn’t help that I was so flustered, I forgot to grease the pan! Much to my relief, it still came out of the pan just fine).

Well, the cottage cheese custard layer also baked up as cake! Nothing about this recipe was predictable… except that it was indeed delicious and worth the investigative effort.

As my son says, “There is so much yum in this!” He also claims that it’s the best cake I’ve ever made. I’m not sure I’d take it that far, but it’s definitely scrumptious and worthy of serving guests.